In the Media

"When you think about low-income renters who are already reliant on social security to a greater degree than their higher-income peers, this is a big concern," says Jennifer Molinsky of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“Renters typically have much less control over their housing costs,” said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “And renters tend to have lower incomes and to rely more on Social Security, which is a concern if cost-of-living adjustments don’t keep up with rising rents.”

A steep cost increase means that about 4 million renter households who could have bought the median priced home last year could no longer do so twelve months later, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Annual rent growth there hit 11.6% at the end of 2021 and start of 2022, about three times what it was in the five years prior to the pandemic, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. "It’s a truly unprecedented market in a lot of ways,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Harvard housing center.

Still, nearly half of all renters in the U.S. are paying 30% or more of their annual income on rent, according to a report from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A 2021 study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found that restrictive land-use regulations were significant barriers to producing needed housing, but many urban areas enforce minimum lot sizes to control congestion.

From the 1930s to the '60s, the federal government embarked in redlining, which was a racially explicit housing policy that provided home loans to white families and denied those same loans to Black families, says Center researcher Raheem Hanifa.

Growth in homeowner spending for improvements and repairs is expected to slow for the rest of 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. The center’s Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity predicts homeowner improvement and repair spending repair spending will grow 17.4% this year to $431 billion

“Builders are becoming very cautious, because they are seeing rising inventory.” In the short term, Daniel McCue at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said this could be a good thing for some buyers, “because builders will have to lower prices in the face of this declining demand.”

The United States has a massive shortage of affordable housing: 14% of all households — and nearly a quarter of renters — are considered severely burdened, meaning they pay more than 50% of their income toward housing.